The value of diversity in an agile environment

There is much talk about diversity in the software development field and in the tech industry in general, and yet most teams and organizations comprise mostly a single cultural group. The dominant group may be 20- and 30-something white males, as is common in Silicon Valley, or some other culturally homogenous group, such as H1B holders from the same country, as is common in large corporations.

When nearly everyone in an organization has the same general worldview, problem-solving approach, educational background, life experience, and so forth, the organization tends to suffer from groupthink - they can only conceive of a single approach to achieving a goal or solving a problem. When faced with a unique challenge or an unexpected change in circumstances, such an organization often has great difficulty.

In contrast, a diverse organization can bring to bear a variety of perspectives, experiences, collaboration styles, and problem-solving approaches. The rich blend of differences enables the organization to adapt to change and to overcome unexpected challenges creatively and flexibly. How can we build a more diverse workforce in the software development field?

Learning Outcome

1. Clear connection between diversity and business value

2. Difference between general definition of "diversity" (inclusion of under-represented groups) and business definition (a range of different styles of collaboration, communication, problem-solving, decision-making, conflict-resolution, and action)

Diane Zajac - Be More Than a Proxy

schedule 3 years ago

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120 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

As a business analyst on an agile team, do you spend your time gathering decisions from product owners and passing them on to development teams? Are you tired of simply being a “proxy without power?” As a product manager, do you feel like you are just collecting stakeholder opinions and filtering them for the team? What can you do to boost your impact to your team?

Be more than a proxy.

By definition, a proxy means doing a thing “by the authority to represent someone else.” That job can be important, especially when stakeholders and customers have limited available. But teams need more.

In this workshop, Diane Zajac-Woodie demonstrates how you can be more than a proxy. Through some experiential exercises, you will learn what impact collaboration has on results and why requirements are just as important as ever. Diane also teaches you how to document requirements so people will actually read them. Using acceptance tests, you will practice writing requirements that describe the exact behaviors that you expect in a format that everyone understands.

Be inspired to embrace your role in an agile environment and leave with new techniques that ensure that you will be more than a proxy when you head back to work.

Amber King - Make The Right Changes & Make Changes Right Through Process Co-creation

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

In the agile community, we celebrate failure as well as success. On our journey to plan @ scale, the Agile Program Management team at Opower had a lot of early failures, but then we started succeeding. How? By not only listening to our stakeholders, but co-creating solutions with them. In this talk, I focus on how process co-creation is helping Opower scale. I’ll describe a specific case study, then we’ll try co-creation together. By the end of this talk, you’ll have specific tips and techniques on how to successfully co-create solutions with your teams that you can take back and use with them tomorrow.

schedule 3 years ago

45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

You probably started your Agile journey with Scrum, which helped. But regression testing still takes forever. New feature tests aren't what they could be and are hard to complete within the Sprint.

If you have active product owners, the POs helped to improve your product, but there is still a disconnect, between the user story and the tests. And how do you test "as a, I want, so that"?

Now you hear you need Agile technical practices to keep improving and you find you need to automate. What are you going to do with your testers? They really, really know your business, but they don't code.

If you are a manager, a tester or a product owner, come hear Camille as she shares her experience successfully teaching manual testers Automated Test Driven Development and showing product owners how to write great Acceptance Criteria that are easy to automate.

In this session you will learn:

How to get your product owners, testers and developers to understand each other

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Are you overwhelmed and/or confused as to which metrics can reveal insights to make fact-based decisions to properly manage your agile software development portfolio. Join us for a the story of a journey, where we will use the metaphor of “going on a road trip” to explain and demonstrate simple yet effective metrics for agile portfolio management. As we go on our road trip, we’ll highlight the importance of defining and then using quantitative “roll-up” metrics to enable leadership to make informed strategic decisions without slowing delivery team activities while at the same time providing a foundation for team self-management and autonomy. We’ll use the road-trip metaphor to depict the challenges that teams and organizations encounter attempting to manage their portfolio without effective portfolio metrics defined. Think about what driving on a road trip would be like if your car didn’t have a check-engine light or a gas gauge, sound risky??? The good news is: it doesn’t have to be that way, and believe it or not, if you have measurements at the team level creating actionable portfolio-metrics is easier than you think. As we recommend simple portfolio-level metrics to guide our road trip, we’ll define them, share how to interpret them, discuss the insights they provide, and offer guidance on how to gather or aggregate them from team execution data. We will also touch on why and how the use of an easy to understand metaphor has aided significantly in creating and sustaining engagement amongst stakeholders for portfolio inception and governance activities. Participants will leave having learned how to successfully navigate their next enterprise-wide initiative using quantitative data to promote alignment, maximize return on investment, foster engagement and reduce risk - everyone attending will receive a printed guide (worksheet) summarizing recommended metrics for agile portfolio management discussed.

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

We all know that a Minimum Viable Product is a lean startup technique designed to test and validate if a solution actually solves a customer problem. It is an endeavor to go forth and learn to then, iterate or pivot as you better understand the problem and solution. To be successful, it is not only about learning what the people want but also being able understand the most painful aspects of that problem to then define what is the minimum amount of work you can do to generate early value to them. But how do we figure that out? In this 45-minute workshop, you will learn what is an MVP; why it matters; what makes a good MVP experiment; and how to get started on designing your own. By the end of this 45-minute workshop, you will have:

Created a problem statement, or hypothesis for an MVP

Turned your hypothesis into a list of possible experiments

Collaborated with agilists who will help you formulate your MVP concept and experimentation ideas

Anu Smalley - Product Owner Must Be’s

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

We often talk about what the Product Owner Must "Do" - they must own the Product Backlog, they must manage the product backlog and the priorities, they must refine the backlog, they must answer the team's questions.

We very rarely talk about what the Product Owner must "Be".

During this session I will highlight what I have learned from my experience as a Product Owner and a Product Owner coach, what I believe are the main Must "Be's" for a Product Owner.

Brandon Raines - Agile Planning and Estimating Techniques in a Federal World

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

The government is seeing the merit of using agile practices to develop software. However, the fallacy that you can’t estimate projects using agile in the government still exist. The result is that many projects that want to use Agile begin in a very waterfall way developing the initial plan and are forced to stick to that plan throughout the project despite using sprints throughout the ‘development phase’. Many falsely believe they are stuck in the tradition of estimating everything in the beginning. During this presentation, through lecture and based upon real experiences, we will demonstrate techniques for developing a project plan and estimating techniques to satisfy the typical government compliance requirements using Agile practices and principles. In essence, we will together learn how to build the bridge from the traditional government practices to a brave new world where we can plan, estimate and still inject agility.

Ken Furlong - How to Organize Multi-Team Programs

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Why does the Agile community encourage cross-functional teams? So many large organizations have naturally organized into system-specific teams. This is a very common and logical approach. At scale, though, it creates serious impediments to organizational agility and getting things done. We'll discuss the roots of that phenomenon, one of our key interests in cross-functional teams, patterns for enabling such a team structure, some failure modes, and how to prevent them. Please join us!

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Delivery teams know from experience the importance of maintenance such as applying patches, upgrading, and conforming to the latest security and accessibility regulations. Product Owners, other value team members, and system stakeholders are focused on functionality and end user satisfaction. Maintenance isn’t sexy and can sink in priority until it fails to be included in releases.

The Security community has been using Dark/Abuser/Evil Stories using the persona of a Black Hat Hacker to uncover vulnerabilities. In this workshop participants will assume the role of Delivery Team members and use the power of personas to write “Dark Stories” that bring to life the full impact of failing to perform necessary maintenance. The intent is to give Product Owners a complete understanding of the importance of maintenance so they can appropriately prioritize maintenance and keep their systems strong.

Dave Nicolette - Shit Agile Coaches Say

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

"Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes." - Desmond Tutu

The agile community has evolved into a group of highly enthusiastic proponents who bring a high level of excitement to everything they say and do. Agilists speak a strange sort of insider jargon in which plain English words have very unusual, and often counterintuitive meanings.

They may describe your multi-billion-dollar enterprise as "dysfunctional" and on the verge of "failure." They may suggest your teams "sprint" to get work done, and yet do so at a "sustainable pace." They may tell your management that agile helps teams "go faster" while assuring your teams that agile isn't about "going faster." They may insist that agile is more about culture and mindset than about practices, and then measure your progress in terms of how faithfully you follow a prescribed set of practices.

There are many more examples of this odd insider jargon, starting with the seminal buzzword itself, "agile." Over the years, the way agilists speak has confused and turned off many who might otherwise have benefited from applying agile values and principles. The presenter will share several stories of the unintended effects of agile-speak, and will invite you to share your own tales of woe and amusement.

Yuval Yeret - Boosting agile in the trenches

schedule 3 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

More and more organizations have already reached some level of Agility. Some of them reached what we call Stable/Recharge which means they stabilized some structure/process that works for them. They had a couple of months or even years to “digest”/”recharge” and are now waking up hungry for the next level. Others got stuck along the way with some process that frustrates them but they didn’t really know what to do with it and just continued to suffer. These ones typically have a grudge towards agile when we meet them. People in these two groups have some common ground - they have a lot to benefit if they get exposed to some practical tips and tricks from the trenches that can help connect “by the book” agile to the day to day reality in the typical organization.

In this "Agile Boost Camp" session we will give participants ideas/tips for working through typical boost/reset challenges. These tips/ideas are inspired by working in the trenches with real world organizations.

Each time this session/workshop runs is different because the workshop runs in an agile form where the participants act as the “Product Owners” choosing and customizing the agenda. The trainer brings in the experience and best practices as well as orchestrates the workshop experience.

Brian Sjoberg - Moving at the Speed of Molasses ... This Might Have Something to do with It!

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Demonstration

Beginner

Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a fire that will help you, your team and your organization to become more productive and improve product quality. We will discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels.

Knowing this will help anyone to understand the consequences of not prioritizing and increase their desire to. This will lead to producing faster, higher quality products that should lead to delighted customers.

Mathias Eifert - Using Lean Thinking to Increase the Value of Agile

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

“Agile doesn’t have a brain.” This quote from Bill Scott, ‎VP, Business Engineering and Product Development at PayPal, is provocative for sure, but it highlights the perception that in most organizations Agile is primarily applied as a downstream engineering approach. As such, it isn’t inherently concerned with optimizing product design and user experience, the biggest drivers of customer satisfaction. The feedback cycles that form the basis of Scrum provide verification and validation of stakeholder needs only as they are expressed in the backlog’s user stories. Even if a sufficiently empowered and accessible Product Owner is available, agile methods offer little guidance on how to translate organizational goals and customer needs into the backlog’s content and relative priorities in the first place. As a result, the danger persists that agile teams end up very efficiently building products that implement an incomplete and subjective perception of the wants and needs of both the organization and its customers.

In this session, we will explore how Lean thinking expands the “inspect and adapt” loops of agile development and helps systematically determine which features and design choices really provide the greatest organizational value. After a brief introduction to Lean concepts, we will discuss how Lean approaches product development as a series of hypotheses about customers’ behavior and value perception and builds on Agile’s rapid iterative delivery of working software to test these assumptions. Finally, we will examine ways to derive testable assumptions from organizational goals, such as the Lean UX Hypothesis Statement template and Gojko Adzic’s Impact Mapping.

schedule 3 years ago

45 Mins

Workshop

Advanced

The retrospective is one of the most powerful Agile ceremonies. They require you to learn from your experiences and challenge you to continuously improve.

In this interactive session, you’ll explore retrospectives in depth, including activities to bring out different personality types and patterns for different levels of team maturity.

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Context:

Scrum has gifted a few Scrum Ceremonies to the world: Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Backlog Grooming and the Sprint Retrospective. The Retrospective is one of the most important and the most powerful Ceremony.

Retrospectives are required to learn from the experience and improve upon. To he ever-growing competition, the Organizations need to learn a lot from their experience and change accordingly (Charles Darwin: Survival of the fittest).

If it is performed well, it can yield wonderful outcomes to improve anything/everything.

Over a period of time, the teams start feeling bored about the same Old Retrospective (Glad, Sad or Mad, etc) so a lot of Fun/engagement part needs to be added to the same.

In the current times, Retrospectives need a rebirth otherwise Retrospectives will die and the Learning curve will die as well!

schedule 3 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

We've all heard how we need to collaborate better, but what does this really mean? What results can I expect to see with better collaboration?

This workshop will demonstrate how productivity increases with greater collaboration and how to create better a more collaborative environment. In the session you will not only have an opportunity to experience this relationship with a relatively simple learning game, but we'll look behind the curtain at the science and how some various behavioral models explain why this relationship exists. We'll then explore some tactics you can use to help teams collaborate better and close with an exploration of what either helps or hinders collaboration and how you can use this information as well as the game with your teams.

If you have an interest in improving productivity of your team or the teams you serve, then this is the session for you.

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Advanced

Many Agile adoptions stall because they fail to align with what the business needs. It's not about just delivering work more quickly, but also ensuring that it is what the business needs; for the Government, this is mission needs alignment. Getting a fully automated DevOps pipeline does nothing if you don't have any idea what type of impact you plan to make on the business.

However, once you have that delivery aligned with your business or mission, you can begin to perform experiments safely and more importantly measure the impact they make. This session will discuss the types of measurements one can make and explore a few techniques you can use at both the macro and micro level to understand impact. We'll cite real-world examples set to help you understand how to apply each of the following techniques:

Business Canvas

Value Streams

Personas and Customer Experience Journeys

Impact Maps

Experiments & Hypotheses via Validation Boards

This tour of techniques will give you ways to better craft your agility to your business needs.

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

So you want to transform your organization? How should you get started? Am I throwing everything away?

Understanding how to co-create your organization's aspirational characteristics creates a great start to your Agile journey. This allows the people to internalize what agile means to them in their context; doing this will allow greater alignment and commitment during the transformation. We'll explore a technique that allows you to do this invented by some coaching colleagues (Michael Sahota and Olaf Lewitz) and that I've utilized in Federal and commercial clients.

After performing this short exercise, we'll discuss next steps of selecting strategies using Appreciative Inquiry to help find and build upon your organization's strengths. Along the way, we'll learn a bit about what Appreciative Inquiry is and how it complements other change management approaches one can take. Don't throw out everything, build on your strengths!

Paul Boos - The Facilitative Leader

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

In the Agile community, we often talk of Servant Leadership, but this notion often doesn't resonate with leaders that have a history for more command and control based approaches. While Servant Leaders exhibit behaviors preferred for leading and supporting teams, the transition can be difficult to grasp. In order to help leaders understand and take action, I have merged the concepts of Servant Leader with a participatory style to become Facilitative Leadership. This provides a means for better helping people understand more of what they can take action on.

This talk will help people understand how anyone can become a facilitative leader with a specific focus on people who need help in transitioning their thinking from typical command and control approaches to those that are more facilitative. So if you have been struggling how to serve your teams better, let's reframe how we think of approaching the actions we can take.

Dave Rooney - Emergent Design with Test-Driven Development

schedule 3 years ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

This workshop shows how Test-Driven Development (TDD) is used to enable emergent design. Using a simple but representative example in Java, the presenter will demonstrate how a low-level design naturally emerges when using the TDD cycle of test/code/refactor. The audience will be involved by suggesting the next steps and also by pairing with the presenter.

Note that the goal of the session isn't necessarily to have a complete working example at the end, but to illustrate the process of low-level design through TDD.

Dave Rooney - Digging to the Roots

schedule 3 years ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Whether it's a minor typo on a page, a major failure causing a severe outage of a system or anything in between, the software industry is fertile ground for examining problems and their causes. From the problems that plagued HealthCare.gov to defects that allowed some lucky people to purchase airline tickets for almost nothing from United airlines, we hear a constant stream of issues with software systems.

With our society becoming increasingly dependent on software, we need to "up our game" with respect to tracking down problems with they happen, ensuring that defects are caught before entering the wild, and are prevented from occurring in the first place.

Root Cause Analysis is a process that enables this form of continuous improvement and uses techniques borrowed from other engineering disciplines. The aviation industry, for example, constantly seeks to improve due to the dire consequences of any failures in that domain.

This interactive workshop will explain when and how to use Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to investigate problems and determine actions that will ensure that those problems can never happen again. Using real world examples the attendees will explore simple, lightweight RCA practices as well as a more involved example using fault tree analysis.